PLAGUES STRIKE THE EARTH!

AND EVERY ONE HAS ITS CAUSE

Nations around the world have recently
marked the observance of "World AIDS Day". Giant ribbons were hung
from a bridge over Sydney harbor, stunt planes over France created a
giant ribbon of red smoke, and cities around the U.S. and the world
held vigils and concerts in honor of those who have died from the
AIDS virus. There were calls for more funding for medical research,
and in South Africa Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu publicly asked all who
practice extra-marital sex to "please wear a condom."

A plague of biblical proportions
is in the land as the destruction of the human immune system
continues unabated. AIDS is only one of the many forces that are
diminishing the human body's ability to fight disease. The causes of
this plague are multitudinous. The most obvious cause of the growing
AIDS crisis is deviant sexual practices or shared syringes among drug
users. Other immune deficiencies can be attributed in part to drug
pushers masquerading as doctors. It can also be blamed on the
atrocities committed by giant agribusiness concerns who pump farm
animals full of hormones and antibiotics to achieve maximum weight
for market. Ultimately, the responsibility lies with individuals who
will not repent of their sick, sexual behavior, or who patronize
their butcher and doctor because they like how animal flesh tastes
and the pills that mitigate the effects of their appetite.

As civilization continues its precipitous
decline, it becomes more and more prone to seek a "pill", a "vaccine"
or a "condom" as a remedy for its plagues. Billions and billions of
dollars have been spent looking for ways to cure AIDS, cancer, and
other diseases, but nothing significant has been accomplished except
the enrichment of the medical establishment. Why is this remedy so
illusive? Why are our best scientists so baffled? It is because the
cure to these ills are as simple as "prevention", which also implies
a change of behavior. Since society would rather die than give up its
vices, it will continue to call in vain to its drug pushers and
magicians, and the plagues will continue to have their ravaging
effects.

While there are many who may be willing to
condemn homosexuality or illicit drug use as the causes of the AIDS crisis, there are few
who would be willing to examine their beliefs in society's more
established institutions. After all, agriculture is as American as
"Mom and apple pie", and don't "real men eat beef"? Anyone who
questions the ethics and health dangers of animal product consumption
is quickly labeled as a pinko animal rights fanatic, especially by
those of the "conservative" persuasion. A little investigation will
prove that there are eating practices that cause more suffering and
death than aberrant sexual practices.

LIFE OF COMMERCIAL FOOD ANIMAL - NO PICNIC!

"Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity." - George Bernard Shaw

In his book entitled, Diet for a New
America , John Robbins describes the horrific conditions that
commercial farm animals are kept in, as well as the drugs and
hormones that are injected into these animals to maximize
agribusiness profits. If one gives any credit to the phrase, "You are
what you eat," it should not be hard to see that the hellish life
that these creatures live before they are killed must certainly
affect those whose stomachs become their graves.

The chicken of today does not live in a
barnyard, but a "chicken factory". These assembly line chickens do
not scratch in the dirt, but live in cages called "batteries."
Because they are crammed into these cages like sardines and kept
under lights for 23 hours a day, these highly sensitive creatures
tend to go berserk. In their madness they are prone to stampedes.
Panicking birds sometimes pile on one another and some are smothered
to death. The farmer has found that stuffing them into even smaller
cages so that they can barely move, makes it harder for them to pile
on one another when they panic. In their insanity the chickens tend
to peck and cannibalize each other, so the farmer cuts the top part
of their beak off to reduce his losses. Since chickens' toes tend to
grow around the cage wire where they sit, the toes are cut off as
well.

"Whenever people say 'we mustn't be
sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel.
And if they add, 'we must be realistic,' they mean they are going to
make money out of it". - Brigid Brophy

The entire process from beginning to end
is one designed to maximize profit. Robbins quoted one poultry man
who summarized his business in this manner: "Virtually all chickens
raised in the United States today are fed a diet laced with
antibiotics from their first day to their last. Without antibiotics,
the industry could not maintain the intensive farming practices. An
awful lot of them die anyway, before we can get our profit out of
them. Without antibiotics, why, we'd be back to the backward
practices of yesteryear." One president of a Georgia poultry firm put
it this way: "The object of producing eggs is to make money. When we
forget this objective, we have forgotten what it is all about."
Another poultry man was quoted in Poultry World as saying, "I am in
this business for what I can make out of it. If it pays me to do this
or that, I do it and so far as I am concerned that is all there is to
say about it." (Diet for a New America).

Things are not any better for the
mild mannered cow in commercial operations. "Stock density" is a
method of maximizing profits in the feed lot. "Studies at the
University of Minnesota suggest maximum profits can be obtained by
allowing each of these large animals fourteen square feet of living
space. To realize what this means, consider that a typical 12'x15'
bedroom is 180 square feet. Imagine thirteen half ton steers in your
bedroom and you've got the picture. Besides "stock density", a cow
must face dehorning, castration, being fed "sawdust laced with
ammonia and feathers, shredded newspaper, processed sewage, inedible
tallow and grease, poultry litter, cement dust, and cardboard scraps,
not to mention the insecticides, antibiotics and hormones." (ibid).

The milk cow fares no better than the beef
cow. "Old Bessie may spend her whole life in a concrete stall, or,
worse yet, for her legs and feet, on a slatted metal floor. She is
pregnant all the time and her nervous system has been made so ragged
by breeding practices devoted exclusively to milk production and a
lifestyle that affords her no exercise, that this most mellow and
patient of animals has become something else. She is today so tense,
nervous and hyperactive that she often has to be given
tranquilizers." (ibid).

Cattleman Herb Silverman expressed his
concern over the high level of drugs fed to today's cattle when he
said: "It's not good. Instead of improving husbandry practices, which
would make the animals healthier, we just shoot 'em up with drugs.
It's cheaper that way, and because this is a competitive business
I've got to do it, too. But in the meantime the general public is
catching on, and getting afraid of residues in the meat [not to
mention milk]. And I'll tell you something. I don't blame them."
(ibid).

The pig endures all of the horrors of
commercial pork production, which includes living in cages stacked
five or six high, drenched in falling excrement and having its
sensitive respiratory system assaulted by powerful ammonia vapors. Up
to 80 percent of hogs have pneumonia by the time they are butchered.
Instead of being buried under a stampede like the crazed chickens,
many hogs fall victim to their fellow inmates' "tail biting" fetish.
Like chickens, hogs go crazy in the commercial pig factory and tend
to bite on each other's curly, pink tails. Sometimes after the tail
is bitten off, the pig keeps biting into his fellow's rear end,
tearing out his bowels and rendering him mortally wounded and unfit
for market. Tail biting is not good for the pocketbook, so the farmer
cuts the pigs' tails off.

OUR CONTEMPORARY DEATH CAMPS

"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities" - Voltaire

The slaughter house is another shop of
horrors that will be measured by history to be equivalent in some
respects to Auschwitz and Dachau. The imagery of this description
betrays a Nazi death camp environment: "Barely three months had
passed since Yoineh Meir had become a slaughterer, but the time
seemed to stretch endlessly. He felt as though he were immersed in
blood and lymph. His ears were beset by the squawking of hens, the
crowing of roosters, the gobbling of geese, the mooing and bleating
of calves and goats; wings fluttered, claws tapped on the floor. The
bodies refused to know any justification or excuse - every body
resisted in its own fashion, tried to escape, and seemed to argue
with the Creator to its last breath." (ibid).

Another writer described the
slaughterhouse as "infernos of nauseous smells, pools of blood, and
screams of terrified animals." (ibid).

"Before they
reach their end, the pigs get a shower, a real one. Water sprays from
every angle to wash the farm off them. Then they begin to feel
crowded. The pen narrows like a funnel; the drivers behind urge the
pigs forward, until one at a time they climb onto a moving
ramp....Now they scream, never having been on such a ramp, smelling
the smells they smell...it was a frightening experience, seeing their
fear, seeing so many of them go by. It had to remind me of things no
one wants to be reminded of anymore, all mobs, all death marches, all
mass murders and extinctions...." (ibid).

"The poet Dylan Thomas once admonished us,
'do not go gentle into that dark night.' The animals whose lives we
methodically take by the millions day in and day out would have
understood his meaning. They do not go gently. They go kicking and
screaming, bellowing their protest, fighting for their lives, and
calling, to the last, to be saved. Calling for somebody, somewhere,
to please hear them." (ibid).

HUMANITY PAYS THE PRICE

"I tremble for my species when I reflect that God is just". - Thomas Jefferson

Already doctors and parents have become
alarmed by children as young as four and five who have developed
fully formed breasts because of the growth hormones passed to them
through cows' meat and milk. One case cited a twelve year old boy who
developed breasts because of these hormones. Studies have shown that
high school girls in Britain are maturing sexually three to five
years earlier than they were several years ago, and this is just the
tip of the iceberg. One emergency room nurse told The WINDS that
people who are coming into the emergency room with the cold and flu
are "not just sick, they are really sick, and they're scared." Common
illnesses are more acute, indicating a weakening of the immune
system. Studies are beginning to reveal the effects that antibiotics
in animal products have on the human consumer, as well as all the
other chemical residues that make it to the grocery store.

"...There is something uniquely painful
happening in the way contemporary animals are being raised for meat.
Animals have been treated cruelly before- -and in some cases
sadistically -- but the process has never before been
institutionalized on such an overwhelming scale. And never before has
the cold expertise of modern technology and pharmacology been
employed to this end.

"Could it be...that when we eat the flesh
of animals who have been treated with such complete contempt, that we
assimilate something of their experience and carry it forward into
our own lives? Could it be that eating the products of such an insane
system may contribute significantly to the feeling pervading mankind
today that this earth sometimes resembles the lunatic asylum of the
universe?" (ibid).

THE FREE MARKET AT WORK

"Men dig their graves with their own
teeth and die more by those fated instruments than the weapons of
their enemies." Thomas Moffett, Health's Improvement 1600 A.D.

The "free market system" being enforced
upon the world is not "free" at all, but is a system of force and
coercion. If a modern farmer wants to survive, he has to use modern
farming methods in order to compete in the highly competitive market
where the profit margins are slim. If he doesn't use the drugs,
hormones and "efficient" husbandry methods being promoted by the
large agribusiness concerns, he will not make any money; so, the
farmer chooses to conform rather than lose his farm. The ones who
make the big money in this arrangement are the banks who are in
collusion with the large agrichemical and drug companies.

The result is a horrible system of animal
abuse that is unimagined by most people who think of their meat as
they do their fruits and vegetables. The result is also millions of
people who are being poisoned by the flesh of tortured creatures that
they put in their stomachs, flesh that is full of drugs and hormones.
The ever increasing rate of illness among people today can be traced
to a weakened immune system that is the result antibiotics being
passed to them from their animal products.

People may laugh at the thought of being
concerned over the fate of the farm animal, as though they were
sacred cows from India or something. What they should stop and
consider, however, is that the agribusiness and farm finance cartels
do not differentiate between man and beast. They are as willing to
poison the human population for profit as they are to torture and
abuse the animal population. It is all the same to them.

What should be of greater alarm is that this
represents a trend in the global economy of the 90's and beyond. All of
humanity is being merged into one "global herd", whose only purpose is
to profit those who are high up in the realm of international finance.
Those conditions that the people of the nations, especially in the West,
support among the commercially raised food animals, they will find
applied to them over time. The drive for high efficiency in the work
place, as well as corporate downsizing and massive layoffs, are all the
first evidences of a system that makes profits its only consideration,
whether it is herding man or beast.

The universe is a very fair place. If
there is any one left on this planet with a disposition to do so, it
would benefit them to examine the system that they support with their
appetites, their labor and their money. If they are supporting
oppression and torture of either man or beast, they may be assured
that they will face the same conditions. What poetic justice - for
one to wear the yoke he has so readily placed on others!

"Ask now the beasts, and they
shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee:
Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the
sea shall declare unto thee. Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for
whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
Job 12:7,8 ; Galatians 6:7.

Excerpts taken from Diet for a New America by John Robbins
Published by Stillpoint Publishing, Walpole, NH

Written 3/97

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